Burn CD "On the fly"
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Hello all, I would like to get a small help from you all. My company is planning to develop a software which writes a CD/DVD on the fly. The input of the writer will come directly from a webcamera through any encoder software. The important thing is the data is not keeping as a temporary backup in hard disc but it is writing directly. As soon as the camera stops(Or before 30 sec.) I would like to get the CD in return with all of the captured images like a video CD. Anybody have similar products? Please give me some idea. It would be a great help for me if you have any idea about the usage any API in the writing section. Thanking you in advance. Please help me at your maximum. Manu Philip
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Hello all, I would like to get a small help from you all. My company is planning to develop a software which writes a CD/DVD on the fly. The input of the writer will come directly from a webcamera through any encoder software. The important thing is the data is not keeping as a temporary backup in hard disc but it is writing directly. As soon as the camera stops(Or before 30 sec.) I would like to get the CD in return with all of the captured images like a video CD. Anybody have similar products? Please give me some idea. It would be a great help for me if you have any idea about the usage any API in the writing section. Thanking you in advance. Please help me at your maximum. Manu Philip
I did something like this for backup software. First, if you have a choice use DVD+R or DVD+RW for this, because they have the best support for preventing "underrun". In fact if you are using CDs, to be legal you must be sure that your datastream is always big enough to write data when the drive is ready! (even if you are not!) I break this rule all the time on a modern drive, without too many problems, but if you sell this you need to require that your customers have a drive with good underun protection. Next, go to www.t10.org and buy the MMC standards. (you can download them too, but not the latest versions...) You might want to consider joining, depending on how technical your people are. t10 is the scsi standards orginization. Every CD writer that is faster than 4x is scsi! (it may be electrically IDE or USB, but it speaks the scsi standard, so that is what you care about). Read the standard several times until you think you understand it. Now, figure out how to send SCSI commands on your os. On Windows NT/2000/XP it is a device_ioctl SCSI_PASSTHROUGH_DIRECT (or something like that). Windows 95/98/me uses something else. Unix is something different again, different for each unix. Next you need to figure out what standard you will write data in. I don't know anything about the video CD standard, so I can't help you there. You can define your own format if you don't care about nothing else being able to read the disk. If you want to write a file, then you can either figure out UDF (I didn't, but this is perhaps the right way to go), or you can write ISO-9660. ISO-9660 is most easially found under the name ECMA-119. Get the spec, and learn that inside and out. There is just one detail you need to know: reserve a track at the begining of the disk, then write data to the next track, when done you write your directory to the reserved track. It took me about 4 months to write this myself (design through release). I had the advantage of a SCSI abstraction layer in place so I didn't need to worry about many of the details you will need to learn. Once you understand the standards and have a design the code is only a couple weeks, but it takes a while to figure out how to read all the standards. Good luck. If you have any more questions let me know, but not until you have studied all the documents I listed above!